Robert Jay N. PANALIGAN
The Philippines is an archipelagic country consisting of large and small islands. It is essential to have link structures like bridges. After a disaster like earthquakes, bridges must be maintained to give way for an effective rescue operation and transporting of relief goods to the affected area. Most of the bridges in the Philippines were built on designs using the old code, which is based on the traditional approach, the Force-Based Design Method. In this method, demand and capacity are compared in terms of forces, and the displacement is verified at the end of the design process. Currently, the Displacement-Based Design method is the new approach in evaluating the seismic performance of a bridge, which is more precise in terms of assessing damages, in which the seismic displacement is the primary criterion in this approach. In this study, the author tries to apply the Displacement-Based Design methods to an existing typical bridge in the Philippines to evaluate the damaged deformation capacity by Nonlinear Dynamic Analysis (Time History Analysis). In conclusion, the author extracts some earthquake displacement response characteristics of typical bridges in the Philippines, which have not been evaluated so far and clarifies the merits of the displacement-based design method.
Keywords: Force-Based Design, Displacement-Based Design, Displacement.